Splunk® Enterprise

Securing Splunk Enterprise

Splunk Enterprise version 7.2 is no longer supported as of April 30, 2021. See the Splunk Software Support Policy for details. For information about upgrading to a supported version, see How to upgrade Splunk Enterprise.
This documentation does not apply to the most recent version of Splunk® Enterprise. For documentation on the most recent version, go to the latest release.

How to secure and harden your Splunk software installation

Use this topic as a checklist and a roadmap for this manual to help you take all of the steps necessary to secure your Splunk software configuration and protect your data.

Set up authenticated users and manage user access

Use certificates and encryption to secure communications for your Splunk software configuration

Splunk software comes with a set of default certificates and keys that demonstrate encryption. Splunk recommends deploying your own certificates and configuring them to secure communications. See About securing Splunk with SSL in this manual.

Harden your Splunk software instances to reduce vulnerability and risk

  • Set passwords across multiple servers to ensure consistent authentication.

Audit your system regularly

Audit events contain information that shows you what changed in your Splunk configuration. It gives you the where and when, as well as the identity of the actor who implemented the change. Leveraging audit events provides better security and other benefits:

  • Audit your system regularly to monitor user and admin access, as well as other activities that could tip you off to unsafe practices or security breaches.
  • Keep an eye on activities within Splunk (such as searches or configuration changes). You can you can use this information for compliance reporting, troubleshooting, and attribution during incidence response.
  • Audit events are especially useful in distributed Splunk configurations for detecting configuration and access control changes across many Splunk Servers.
    To learn more, see Audit Splunk Enterprise activity in this manual.
  • Use the file system-based monitoring available out of the box on most Splunk-supported operating systems.
    For more information about monitoring, see Monitor Files and Directories in the Getting Data In Manual.
Last modified on 22 January, 2019
About securing the Splunk platform   Install Splunk Enterprise securely

This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk® Enterprise: 7.0.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2, 7.0.3, 7.0.4, 7.0.5, 7.0.6, 7.0.7, 7.0.8, 7.0.9, 7.0.10, 7.0.11, 7.0.13, 7.1.0, 7.1.1, 7.1.2, 7.1.3, 7.1.4, 7.1.5, 7.1.6, 7.1.7, 7.1.8, 7.1.9, 7.1.10, 7.2.0, 7.2.1, 7.2.2, 7.2.3, 7.2.4, 7.2.5, 7.2.6, 7.2.7, 7.2.8, 7.2.9, 7.2.10


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